Abstract

Autism Spectrum Conditions are behaviourally defined, which highlights the need to focus on understanding the behavioural phenotype. Many autistic people experience challenges in social-communicative behaviour. A theoretical account suggests that differential response to social rewards plays a critical role in such challenges. In our lab, we developed and tested different paradigms to create new ways to quantify the response to social rewards in adults and children, and reveal new insights into its underpinning mechanisms. This research, like the majority of autism research worldwide, takes place in western Europe and USA . To move beyond these artificial boundaries in another strand of our research, we studied the autistic phenotype in >11000 Indian schoolchildren. This set of studies not only allowed us to build an autism research toolkit in India, but also provided insights into the impact of socio-linguistic factors on the manifestation of autism. The final strand of our ongoing research connects the research within and outside the laboratory through the development of mobile apps to digitally phenotype autism-related features in the general population.